The Oracle speaks

No not Larry Ellison. StillSecure's oracle of NAC, Dave Greenstein, Chief Security Architect at StillSecure. I write and speak a lot about NAC, but Dave actually lives NAC.  He led our development team that developed Safe Access.  Now he is way out in front researching and designing the next generations of Safe Access and our other products.  Dave doesn't comment on my posts a lot. I am always bugging him to start his own blog.  The best I get is occasionally he will write an article or white paper.  So when he commented on Joel Snyder's article on NAC and my comments, I figured it would make sense to give it some main column play.  Here is what Dave had to say:

In order to use NAP you only need server 2008 for the NPS... Your domain and AD can still be 2003 so I think adoption of NAP will be faster for that reason. Also, XP SP3, which has NAP capabilities, adoption should be pretty fast compared to Vista.

On ACLs, I agree with Joel that ACLs are a great way to do things... But not with routers and DHCP enforcement. If you have HP switches or Extreme Switches then you can do dynamic ACLs per port. Similar to how you assign a VLAN via RADIUS attributes, you can assign ACLs for that port in addition to assigning a VLAN. This is great if you have the right switches. It helps protect the other endpoints within a quarantine VLAN and adds an extra layer of security. Cisco switches do not have this capability unless you’re running Cisco NAC and a Cisco ACS server (ugh). So, buy HP and Extreme switches!

What’s more likely to slow NAP adoption down is it’s total lack of endpoint administration... How do you keep track of what endpoints have which problems? How do you get an endpoint on the network in an emergency even if it has an issue? How do you update the SHAs on your thousands of endpoints? There are a whole host of issues not solved by NAP that make it unusable. That’s where products like StillSecure Safe Access come in.

 

BTW, if you think Dave makes some sense here and would like to hear more from him, let me know and I will coax him into writing some more! I should also add that I twisted his arm to give Safe Access a plug at the end there. Thanks Dave!